The soaring demand for network data throughout the globe has steadily fueled the evolution of networking technologies, as engineers and manufacturers rush to keep pace with the changing data consumption landscape and increasing network scalability requirements. Various network technologies have been developed precisely to meet this soaring demand for network data. For example, overlay network solutions, such as virtual extensible local area networks (VXLANs), as well as virtualization and cloud computing technologies, have been widely implemented in networks with increasing success as popular solutions to such growing demands for network data.
Overlay solutions allow virtual networks to be created and layered over a physical network infrastructure. Accordingly, overlay networks allow network administrators to significantly expand their current physical network infrastructure through the use of such virtual networks. Overlay networks can also provide logical network isolation, which allows a data center or provider to host a large number of customers (also known as “tenants”) while providing each customer their own isolated network domain. Not surprisingly, overlay networks are very popular in large-scale network operations, such as network-based service providers, particularly because overlay networks are highly scalable, and capable of serving vast amounts of customers in a logically isolated fashion.
Typically, such large-scale operations involve massive amounts of traffic data constantly being routed through the various nodes and devices in the network. As the amount of traffic handled by the network grows, it becomes increasingly important to efficiently route such traffic: poor routing strategies can create an enormous burden on the network, which only worsens as the amount of traffic grows. Efficient routing can be accomplished, in part, by identifying routing information needed to route traffic, such as endpoint-to-switch bindings or mappings in a forwarding table. This way, nodes can quickly lookup precisely where traffic needs to be directed rather than broadcasting the traffic on the network or otherwise forwarding the traffic to unnecessary devices.